HOYA award winner Dr. Hertneky promotes vision health abroad

By Dr. George Hertneky and Katie Collins

Posted:
02/10/2016 01:00:00 AM MST

Brush optometrist Dr. George Hertneky traveled to Haiti in January where he spent a week working with Haitians to provide eye care and promote vision centers and training. (Courtesy photo/Dr. George Hertneky)

Local optometrist Dr. George Hertneky, of the Brush-based Hertneky Vision Source Center, recently returned from an adventure in Haiti as an advocate for healthy vision awareness and as ambassador for the ‘Optometry Giving Sight’ (OGS) organization. As recipient of the 2016 HOYA Sight award, Hertneky was honored with the chance to travel to Haiti in January where he spent a week working with Haitians to provide eye care and promote vision centers and training. According to the OGS’ website at www.givingsight.org, Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas and has just three optometrists and six ophthalmologists in the public sector, servicing a country of 10 million. This makes access to eye health services difficult and significantly reduces their ability to break the cycle of poverty through better education and employment. The number one cause of blindness in the world is not having a pair of glasses and more than 600 million people around the world are blind or sight-impaired due to a lack of access to much needed eye exams and glasses. Optometry Giving Sight (OGS) is a charitable organization with a mission to train local eye care professionals in order to establish vision centers that can sustainably deliver local eye care and low cost glasses in poor, third world countries. It does this by raising funds to establish optometry schools and clinics in third world countries so that native residents can be trained to help take care of their own population.

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Instead of having a medical team go to a country, provide medical eye care for a week and then leave, this allows the country to grow their own care is a sustainable way.“It subscribes to the teaching, ‘Give a man a fish and feed them for a day; Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime,’ philosophy,” said Dr. Hertneky upon his return. “I am all for long term and sustainable solutions verses one time quickie fixes.”As the Hoya Sight award winner, Hertneky was rewarded with the trip to Haiti as an OGS ambassador, raising awareness of the lack of eye care facilities there. OGS is in the process of raising $1 million to build an optometry school there and have already helped in countries such as Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Peru, Papua New Guinea, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia to name a few.“I had done similar clinics in Indonesia and Mexico as an optometry student,” said Hertneky, “but this was my first opportunity to do it as a real doctor.” “The team of nine that I was part of flew into Cap Haitian, Haiti on January 10th and saw almost 1700 Haitians over the course of the week,” he reminisced. “Our group consisted of four optometrists, two 4th year optometry school students, and 3 ladies ranging age from 13 to 22.”Located on the south side of Haiti with a population of 1 million, Cap Haitian was lucky to miss the effects of an earthquake that hit near the country’s capital of Port-au-Prince. However, the city nearly doubled in size after the event. Even with the surge, Cap Haitian has just one eye clinic to serve the entire population, with a dual purpose of providing glasses along with cataract and glaucoma surgeries. In comparison, Morgan County, with a population of near 29,000, has four eye care clinics. “I started calling our clinics “Triage Optometry” as qualifying for care in Haiti is way different than in the U.S.,” noted Hertneky. “To qualify for cataract surgery in Haiti, a person had to be seeing 20/400 or worse in their better seeing eye. You are considered legally blind in the US if you can’t see 20/200 or better. In other words, to even be considered for cataract surgery, a person had to be seeing worse than blind in Haiti,” he said. “We referred over 100 people for cataract surgery. Even though cataract surgery only costs $50 in Haiti, we only had funds to barely treat those people whose vision was twice as worse as a blind person in the US and we only had funds to treat one eye on top of that. As Haitians average wage is $2 a day, cataract surgery is outside the reach of the majority”. Hertneky reminisced on one particularly disheartening case involving a 19-year-old girl who came in with a bump on her lower left eyelid. “I diagnosed it as an eyelid cancer,” said Hertneky. “The only problem is that Haiti doesn’t really have a cancer doctor. There might have been a general surgeon at the National Hospital on the other side of the island who MIGHT be able to help. That one is going to stick with me for a long time.”“Then there was the guy whose right cornea was eaten thru by a bacterial infection,” Hertneky remembered. “That eye is gone. He is also heading very fast towards an infection to the brain. Those kinds of things would get you a one way ticket to the operating room for removal of the eye and then an extended hospital stay to fight the infection in the U.S. In Haiti, he walked out with a slip of paper to get to the eye clinic in Cap Haitian as soon as he can. As we were in a rural area, he was a half a day journey from the clinic. Hopefully the clinic will be able to save him in time.”Vision Source itself, North America’s leading network of independent private practice optometrists, challenged its membership to raise $1 million for Optometry Giving Sight, with nearly $700,000 raised to date. By raising money through optometrists, optical companies and people who value good vision, OGS has been able to disburse over $10 million in more than 72 sustainable eye care projects in 37 countries since 2007. The funds have helped provide basic eye care services to over 4 million people, train more than 2,600 eye care personnel and support the establishment of more than 100 vision centers. For anyone wishing to contribute to the building of an Optometry School in Haiti so that they can learn to help themselves, please send a check to the Hertneky Vision Source practice at 212 Cameron Street, Brush, CO 80723 and mark OGS in the memo. If you would like to contribute money towards a cataract surgery for a Haitian, please send a check to the practice and put “cataract’ in the memo. “I would rather have $1 from a 1000 people than $50 from 5 people,” said Hertneky on how others can help the cause. “Please consider giving what you can if you so desire,” he finished. More information on the Optometry Giving Sight programs can be found online at www.givingsight.org, or contact Hertneky Vision Source in Brush by calling (970) 842-5166 or visit them online at www.hertnekyvisioncare.com.

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